“What are you doing out alone so late?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought a stroll in the fresh air would clear my head.” She glanced curiously at the other man, but Mark made no attempt at introductions.
Instead, Mark frowned and motioned around them at the empty beach. “You really shouldn’t be out alone in the middle of the night, Celia. Our security is good, but it still isn’t particularly safe for a pretty young woman to wander around on a deserted beach.”
“But it isn’t quite deserted, is it?” she asked sweetly, resenting his unwanted lecture. “You’re here.”
His frown deepened, exaggerated by shadows into an ominous glare. He seemed to struggle to speak pleasantly and solicitously. “If you’d like to continue your walk, why don’t I call someone to accompany you? One of the staff, perhaps, if Damien is unavailable.”
“Thank you, but if I had wanted company, I would have found it,” Celia answered, speaking with the same forced courtesy. “And, anyway, I was just about to go back in.”
“Looks like rain,” the other man said, squinting up at the rapidly disappearing moon.
The darkness grew heavier. Celia backed a step away from the two men. It wasn’t that they made her nervous, she assured herself. Just…uneasy.
Probably because she’d never really liked Mark and the other man was a stranger, she assured herself. She certainly didn’t consider herself at any risk from either of them.
“Well,” she said, holding her sandals in front of her, “enjoy your walk.”
“Good night, Celia.”
She murmured a response to Mark, nodded pleasantly at the other man, then walked away without looking back. She was aware that they watched her for a few minutes before they turned and continued their walk and their conversation.
“Rather late for a friendly little visit on the beach, isn’t it?” The low growl came out of the shadows of her building. Having been engrossed in watching Mark and the other man disappearing down the beach, Celia jumped several inches at the unexpected voice coming from so close to her.
“Reed!” she gasped, when he separated himself from the dark concrete-block wall. She pressed a hand to her pounding heart. “What the hell—? You scared me half to death!”
“What can you expect when you go wandering around in the middle of the night by yourself?” he returned unrepentantly. “And what the hell were you doing out there with Chenault and Perrelli?”
“Contradicting yourself, aren’t you?” she taunted, her irritation rapidly growing. “First you criticize me for being alone, then you demand to know why I was with someone else.”
She suddenly realized that he’d named the men with whom she’d been speaking. “How do you know Mark Chenault?” she asked. “And who’s Perrelli?”
In the harsh glow of an overhead security light, Reed’s face was a harshly carved mask. She thought she saw a muscle jump in his jaw—something she’d grown to recognize as a sign of self-annoyance. “Never mind,” he said. “You’d better get inside. It’s late.”
She planted her fists on her hips, ignoring the sandals that still dangled from her left fist. “I will not be talked to like a child who is out past her bedtime,” she informed him coldly. “I’ll go in when I damned well feel like it.”
He loomed over her, dressed in dark, snug-fitting clothing that emphasized his size and strength and made him look like anything but an innocuous tax accountant.
She realized that he wasn’t wearing his glasses. His face looked harder, more angular without them. At that moment, he was someone she didn’t even know.
She’d thought he was going to snap at her again. Instead, he remained silent for a long, tense moment, then let out a gust of breath and took a step backward. “You’re right, of course,” he said stiffly. “You have every right to be out here if you want.”
Her satisfaction at his concession mingled with the new awareness of him. An electrically charged awareness that made her skin tingle, her pulse race, her breath quicken. It wasn’t fear making her react this way now, she decided.
Not entirely, anyway.
She reached hesitantly out to him. “Reed?”
He glanced from her hand to her face, his own revealing nothing of his thoughts. “Yes?”
“I’ve missed you,” she said with a candor that wasn’t particularly prudent.
A ripple of some emotion—or was it only a shadow?—passed over his face. And then he took her hand. His voice was much gentler this time. “Have you?”
“Yes.”
He touched her cheek. She wondered if her skin felt as hot to him as it did to her.